Did the American dollar really lose its value?

A recent Washington Post article looks at whether the United States dollar has lost as much value as critics and analysts say. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Did the American dollar really lose its value? Washington Post writer Howard Schneider doesn’t think so. He says the devaluing of the dollar is overstated and it still has a lot of value. He mentions author Eswar Prasad, who wrote the book “The Dollar Trip,” which looked at the U.S. monetary system.

Most of the book says “that when times are good, the U.S. economy is attractive in its own right — people buy a lot of stuff from overseas, other countries are happy to lend money to finance those purchases, and demand for dollars is strong,” wrote Schneider. “And when things are not so good, the United States is still the only place large enough to absorb the world’s spare change and (critically) that is trusted enough to pay it back.”